The problem is that most of these strategies are producing weaker results than they used to. Organic reach keeps shrinking, audiences are overloaded with content, and social feeds have become more competitive than ever. Many marketers spend hours creating posts, videos, and campaigns that barely generate qualified leads.

Paid advertising is not solving the problem either. Ad costs continue to rise, and the results often disappear the moment campaigns are paused. Businesses end up trapped in a cycle of constantly spending more to maintain the same level of visibility and lead generation.

That is why this article focuses on creative social selling methods that are still underused today. Instead of relying only on content volume or expensive ads, these strategies help businesses connect with high-intent prospects, identify real buying signals, and generate leads more effectively in today’s social media landscape.

Note: Ready to find out which social media strategy works best for your B2B business? Sign up for Leadfeeder’s free 14-day trial to track your social selling progress and attract more leads.

1. Find people who are looking for a product like yours

Social media is for everything you can think of. But more than anything, it’s for effortlessly communicating with massive groups of people. 

Social media allows you to create polls, ask for an opinion, and ask for advice from hundreds or thousands of users at once. And people get the most out of this possibility.

If a person is looking for something, for example, a product or service, the second thing they do after Googling is ask about it online. They turn to their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram followers, or to the Reddit community, and ask for recommendations. 

Here’s an example of a clear intent to find a dating app.

For anyone promoting dating apps, it would be enough to look for mentions of “dating app” + “recommend” to find these and similar posts, and pitch their product.

When pitching, you can act as a brand representative or as a regular social media user. Depending on your approach, your actions will be different.

In the first case, you might talk a bit about the product and how it’s better than competitors, and offer a discount or another incentive.

In the second case, you might tell a bit about your personal experience or even just casually mention the product.

Whatever your approach is, however, there is one thing that has to happen before you start selling on social media. And it’s finding these people who are looking for a product or service like yours.

That’s when social media monitoring tools (also called social listening tools) enter the scene.

With most social listening tools, you can set up a complicated query using Boolean search that will find you posts that signal the buying intent.

All you have to do is come up with the phrases that people use and enter them together with the name(s) of your industry. For example, this would be a combination of “can anyone recommend/looking for/need a/” and “fitness watch/fitness tracker”. 

This is an example of a Boolean search query.

In the example, the tool is searching for people looking for a fitness tracker.

Once set up, social listening runs nonstop, and you’ll know about new people voicing their intent on social media as soon as they post. 

What’s so special about this method?

Finding and approaching people who are actively looking for a product or service online means you’re finding leads that are already hot.

You don’t have to convince them they need a fitness tracker. You don’t have to paint a picture when you're with the fitness tracker, they are finally fit and healthy and conventionally happy.

And that’s half the job done.

2. Find the ones who are unhappy with your competitor

Finding people who are unhappy with your direct competitors and offering them your own product or service seems straightforward and logical. However, not many marketers do that. 

The screenshot below shows someone who’s obviously unhappy with NVivo.

For brands that develop tools for qualitative analysis, finding such posts is the easiest lead generation method ever.

If finding posts like these mentioning your competitors is something you’re interested in, here’s how to do it.

Firstly, you’ll need a social listening tool with the sentiment analysis feature. Secondly, you’ll need to set up the tool to monitor your main competitors’ brand names.

Thirdly, after some time has passed, you’ll need to filter the results by negative sentiment to see only the complaints people have about your competitor. 

Note: No sentiment analysis is perfect, so you won’t get the results that are 100% relevant. However, you’ll definitely get enough to work with.

After you have your list of social media posts of your competitors’ customers expressing their dissatisfaction, you can once again choose how to approach those.

Again, you can either act as a company representative explaining how your product doesn’t have the faults of your competitor’s, or as an experienced user who shares their wisdom with anyone who asks.

What’s so special about this method?

It’s brave, bold, and rare. More importantly, you don’t have to convince the customer that she should be interested in your product niche. She’s already tried your competitor and was left unhappy, so she's obviously looking for an alternative. The hottest lead!

3. Find industry micro-influencers

To use social media for lead generation, you often have to earn a reputation. In the eyes of social media, you have to be an expert in your field, like Rand Fishkin, a founder of Moz, who is the obvious SEO expert, and Neil Patel, a founder of different digital marketing tools, who is the go-to expert for digital marketing.

Those two have spent decades proving they know their stuff by sharing and promoting their content.

This isn’t something every marketer can do. Building a personal brand reputation requires a plethora of resources and takes forever.

What every marketer can do, however, is find influencers who already exist in their niche and collaborate with them. 

When people hear “influencer,” they usually imagine someone big. Marie Kondo. Jamie Oliver. All of the Kardashian-Jenner family.

But influencers come in all sizes and forms. Often, you find micro-influencers with a couple of thousand loyal followers who turn out to be very effective for the brand. 

Here’s an example of a micro-influencer in statistics, including everything it encompasses.

Andy Field has around 20,000 followers, which is perfect for growing brand awareness for your product if it has anything to do with statistics. 

There are dozens of influencer marketing tools that find influencers: some are databases, while others are social listening tools that include influencer search as a bonus feature.

Whatever you choose, you get a list of social media experts in your niche with different numbers of followers, pricing, attitude to your product, and so on.

This is the list of influencers made by a social media monitoring tool.

This is the list of influencers made by a social media monitoring tool.

The social media users are sorted by the number of their followers, the times they’ve mentioned the keyword, and the tone they used when they mentioned it.

It takes time to find the right influencer(s) for your brand, but it’s worth it: once the agreement is there, you have someone people listen to, generating leads for you.

What’s so special about this method?

Niche influencers allow you to reach the relevant audience and to speak to them through someone they trust.

Unless you become an influencer yourself (which, as we discussed earlier, is a difficult and time-consuming job), it’s one of the few ways to kill two birds with one stone. 

The Real Shift in Social Media Lead Generation

Social media has never stopped being full of opportunities. However, as social media gains more power and more brands turn to it, it becomes harder to get anything out of it. This relates to lead generation more than anything else.

So you have to get creative and do something a bit differently than everyone else ― and that’s exactly what the methods described above are all about

Combine all three, and you’ll get the effective lead generation on social media strategy that you’ve always dreamed about.

Note: Ready to find out which social media strategy works best for your B2B business? Sign up for Leadfeeder’s free 14-day trial to track your social selling progress and attract more leads.